Guide for Bitcoin & Litecoin mining

If you are looking to mine Bitcoins or Litecoins with MinerGate pool, here are some useful instructions from the member of our team Janika.

Hello! My name is Janika and I am very new to the world of cryptocurrency. I have never tried to mine one of the “major” cryptocurrencies and today I want to prove to you that it is not that difficult even for a novice. Just put your mind to it, I will do my best to help you.

Ready

First of all, you need to know that your mining performance will depend on your hardware. Litecoin and especially Bitcoin require powerful resources to be mined profitably.

There are several possibilities to choose from. First of all, you can use the hashing power of your CPU (central processing unit) or GPU (graphics processing unit), by which I obviously mean graphics card. It is safe to say that you will get better results using the latter, but of course, you are free to experiment.

The third option appeared in 2013 when hardware developers from China released first ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) to mine Bitcoin even faster. Simply put, an ASIC is a microchip that makes the required calculations extremely quickly.

The first cryptocurrency became quite famous in 2011 when Bitcoin reached the price of about $1000. More and more miners joined the network, the difficulty rose and you could run your hardware for weeks without being able to find a single block mining solo. It was a waste of power and money, so miners started to gather into mining pools.

MinerGate is one of those mining pools. The miners form a network to combine their computing powers and have a better chance to find a block. The reward is then spread evenly between the participants of the pool depending on the hashes sent. The more powerful hardware you have, the more hashes you will send.

The competition is very high, so I strongly advise you to do some research before you start mining any of the coins. There are lots of forums where miners share the results they get, you can also create a topic on our forum and discuss the possible outcome for your hardware. The producers of ASICs usually mention the potential hashrate on the package. I can also advise you to visit the pages with hardware comparison:

Set

Settings

Miners often ask me how to set up Bitcoin or Litecoin mining on our pool. Well, here is the answer.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin mining is available on MinerGate in a form of cloud mining contract. It means that you are leasing the power to mine Bitcoin and don’t set up anything yourself. We’ve covered more on the subject in one of the blog posts. You can create a contract on this page.

Litecoin

1. Download a miner that supports Litecoin mining. There are lots of programs available with console or graphic interface. Your final choice depends only on your personal preferences.

2. Connect to MinerGate pool using this address:

stratum+tcp://ltc.pool.minergate.com:3336

3. The settings may vary depending on the miner, there is no universal recipe here. Usually, you can find the information on the website/forum thread where you download the application. Your pool login is the email for your MinerGate account. Instead of the password, just enter x.

Go (the Litecoin mining experiment)

My experience

In theory, it all seems relatively simple and clear. To prove that anyone can do it, I tried it myself in practice.

l am writing this article on a simple laptop, which also became my testing mining rig. Maybe it’s not the perfect machine for mining purposes, although please remember that I do this purely for research.

1. CPU is the only way to mine for me, so I needed to find an application for CPU mining. It wasn’t that hard: there are multiple solutions available. Of course, GUI miners are easier to use but I refused to cut the corners or look for an easy way, so I downloaded pooler’s CPU miner, which works in console mode.

Chrome recognized it as a malicious software, so I went to the advanced settings and disabled protection provided. If you need to do it as well, don’t forget to re-enable it after the download, as there are lots of phishing sites, better safe than sorry.

2. At first, it was quite difficult for me to get used to command line interface, although I wanted to prove that any newbie can succeed with the right attitude. I did my research and managed to figure out the settings. The miner I used provides help if you enter –-help, there you can find all the commands available.

I pressed Enter and it worked! In a couple of minutes, I got the first “yay!”, which means that I found a good share. It was one small step for Litecoin mining history and one giant leap for me. Q.E.D., I’ve proven it – a complete newbie like me with a regular laptop like mine can actually set up mining of one of the major cryptocurrencies.

Calculations

When the sense of wonder gave place to reason and I got a couple of “booos” (bad shares), I cooled down a bit and decided to calculate my potential income in the MinerGate’s Mining Profitability Calculator. The hashrate my laptop was able to reach for Litecoin was about 14-16 kH/s, which seemed really surprising at first as I could get only about 20-22 H/s for Bytecoin, for example.

I entered my best hashrate (16 kH/s) and held my breath…

What? Only $0.00047 a day? Okay, still must be more than what I would make of 22 H/s on one of the CryptoNote coins. Or is it?

As you can see, I would have made about 20 times more mining the most profitable CryptoNote currency for that moment even if I had seemingly about 700 times less hashrate than mining Litecoin. What is the trick here?

Algorithms

Different algorithms reach very different hashrates on the same hardware. Bitcoin is based on SHA-256, Litecoin is based on Scrypt and most of the coins from our pool are based on CryptoNote (technically, it’s CryptoNight and CryptoNote is the technology it is based upon).

CryptoNote is a solid choice for CPU mining, GPU performance may vary. You can try for yourself and share your results with us. The developers deem the algorithm to be a base for egalitarian cryptocurrencies that anybody can mine, that’s why it is also ASIC-resistant. Read more about the technology on the official CryptoNote website.

Hopefully, I was able to give you a rather comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin and Litecoin mining on MinerGate pool. It is not that intricate, although still takes some time and energy to get used to. All you need to do is to dedicate some time to research and I’m sure you will find a perfect match for you and your hardware on our pool. Download our miner to start your journey.

Don’t be shy! We are always happy to share our experience with the new miners, just contact our support team or ask your question in the chat to our support members or moderators.

Comments

I just got this to work as well. Thank you, I’m already up 0.00000025 out of 4 shares. If you don’t mind I might make a similar post and link your post as well from my website at http://www.mrpgamers.com

How do we add the LTC and BTC pools to your minergate GUI v.6.4? I’ve tried every combination i can think of and yet all I get is network error retrying.

For name e.g. I enter BTC. For Pool URL I use: stratum+tcp://btc.pool.minergate.com:3335 Then for Pool Login I enter my email address. No firewall issues without those ports so I’m not sure why there is a network error. Advice>?

I don’t understand what is going on. I have an account with minergate. I use a gpu rig on here. I use the address given for BTC and it keep saying network error and the socket goes dead after about ten minutes. It won’t let me get faster than 1 TH. I emailed you guys on 12/9/16 and I haven’t recieved a response yet and I tried again today and the issue is still there. Is there another address to use as I do see people mining BTC on minergate and they look like they aren’t having any issues like me. I want to put a Spondoolie sp20 to try your site out and then move onto bigger things. Please let me know what is going on with minergate so I can start mining ASAP. Thank you. My email is Walterflack1234@gmail.com. THX

if i build a Ethereum mining rig that suppose to send out 188 mh/s, could i use that with the minergate application to mine XMR? Would the hashrate still be 188 mh/s? And how do i calculate the profit in the minergate website calculator? Sorry im very new to this

Hello! No, it won’t make as much on Monero because it has a different algorithm. Monero’s world hashrate is just about 27.8 Mh/s. Although, it doesn’t mean that it would be unprofitable for you. You can paste the hashrate into calculator to roughly estimate your profit. Unfortunately, it won’t convert your Ethereum hashrate into Monero hashrate.

One thing I have noticed that every single forum I find on all of these forums about these miners is that none of them actually show you or link their .bat file setups. it would be helpful to everyone if people would do these things.

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